Determining the exact location of a device or person has increasingly become important to drive location based activities. Several technologies for doing so have resulted from efforts aimed at determining a person's location. For example, satellite-based global positions systems (GPS) provide location based services, provided the device (i.e., receiver) is outdoors. While most of these technologies work well outdoors, they are inaccurate, indoors.
In particular, GPS systems do not work well indoors. In these systems, satellites broadcast signals to enable GPS receivers (i.e., smartphones, mobile devices, etc.) on or near the Earth's surface to determine location and synchronized time. Several factors, however, damage the GPS signal and thus affect accuracy.
For example, signal degradation occurs when the GPS signal is reflected off objects such as tall buildings or large rock surfaces before it reaches the receiver. This increases the travel time of the signal, thereby causing errors.
In addition, buildings, terrain, electronic interference, or sometimes even dense foliage can block signal reception, causing position errors or possibly no position reading at all. Thus, GPS units typically will not work indoors, underwater or underground. Accordingly, there is a need for improved techniques to determine the location of a device or person where standard GPS fails.
The present disclosure addresses the need in the art for such knowledge. Current technologies that attempt to determine the location of a user indoors use devices called beacons.
For example, by tagging a beacon to a particular location, one may determine the location of a receiver indoors based on the receiver's proximity to the beacon.
The beacon works by using Wi-Fi signals, in particular Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). BLE communication consists of two main parts: broadcasting and connecting.
Broadcasting is a one-way mechanism. Using broadcasting, signal-broadcasting devices or beacons broadcast data to any receiver which may be in listening range, for example, a smart phone in close proximity to the beacon. Devices that broadcast BLE signals, using only the advertising channel, are customarily called beacons. Accordingly, the disclosed signal-broadcasting device represents an improved beacon.
Standard beacons are unreliable and difficult to maintain because they are battery operated, requiring frequent battery replacement. Indeed, a scenario in which a large retail organization deploys 1000 beacons across several parts of a building would result in the inevitable inconvenience of having to replace each battery that eventually dies.
Further, these battery-powered beacons cannot be remotely configured. That is, to change the configurable settings of the beacon (e.g., broadcast range or interval), one must be in close proximity to the beacon to establish a pairing connection. This again represents a challenge in large beacon deployments.
Moreover, these beacons are housed in battery-powered dongles, and/or glued to open surfaces, so they often detract from the physical decor of each installation site and are particularly susceptible to theft. The disclosed embodiments are directed to overcoming one or more of the problems set forth above.
For example, the signal-broadcasting device in the present disclosure may be AC powered, seamlessly integrated to any building without detracting from the buildings original decor, and may be remotely configured via a network (i.e., Internet). Moreover, the mountable features of the signal-broadcasting device make it less susceptible to tamper and theft.